KENT: Vickie Lynn reunion sparked a need to tell more of community's success stories

Before I attended the Vickie Lynn community reunion last Saturday, the thought had crossed my mind that I would feel out of place at the reunion.

After all, I didn't know anyone who would be attending. I have no connection with the neighborhood except that I was aware of where it was located. I was an outsider tagging along, invited because I had done an article in the paper.

By the time I had been there about 15 minutes, I'd had my neck hugged about 15 times, was introduced around by the people I had interviewed, was thanked for coming and welcomed as part of the Vickie Lynn family for the day.

I came away from the reunion knowing that there were a lot more stories that needed to be told.

In attendance was Houston Porter, a former teacher of many of the Vickie Lynn neighborhood kids over at Tabor Junior High. Porter had a powerful impact on his students as well as this community -- he was the first black to serve on the Houston County commission.

"Whatever they had over here," Porter remarked to me after we had chatted for a while, "it needs to be bottled and exported."

Truer words have never been spoken. Something was going on in the Vickie Lynn neighborhood -- a project neighborhood made up of plenty of "nontraditional" families. For the most part black, all of them poor, being raised by parents who didn't have the same access to education as we do nowadays.

But instead of laying down and taking public assistance for the rest of their lives, the families of Vickie Lynn banded together and educated themselves out of poverty.

They attended colleges all over the country, earning bachelor's and master's degrees and doctorates. The "kids" of Vickie Lynn have in turn ensured that the next generation of their family also is educated.

But they didn't stop with their own families. This is a group of people that is plugged in to helping others -- giving back. There was no official statement at the reunion, no rallying cry. What it seemed like to me was that as ingrained in the children of Vickie Lynn that education was the answer out of poverty was also a philosophy that they owed a debt to others -- their parents, their neighbors, their teachers, their community and that spending their lives doing for others, living a life to devoted to God and family, or just simply getting up and going to work every day was a way to pay back that debt.

Over the course of the next few months, I am going to tell you more of the stories from Vickie Lynn in hopes that sharing their lives will help others.

Porter is right. We do need to bottle whatever it is that Vickie Lynn had. In a day and age when public assistance seems to be a way of life and poverty an excuse to break the law and give up, the families of Vickie Lynn need to be held up as an example -- not of how the poor should be but how we all should be. They had faith. They had hope. But most importantly they had love.

Love for their families. Love for their neighbors. Love for their teachers and their coaches. Love for their school and their city.

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Alline Kent can be contacted at 478-396-2467 or allinekent@cox.net.

This story was originally published October 27, 2015 at 10:33 PM with the headline "KENT: Vickie Lynn reunion sparked a need to tell more of community's success stories ."